Carry on the Britishness debate

I think Paul Gilroy underestimates the challenge of making us into "a multicultural and postcolonial country at ease with itself and its past" (A land of tea drinking, hokey cokey and rivers of blood, April 18). Since we don't yet live in an "English state" the issue is not really one of "a more habitable Englishness" but rather "Britishness".

And here lies a central problem, as Britishness was so entangled with the imperial project. The question facing the British body politic today is whether we can find new common bonds to replace those once underpinned by an imperial past, fading wartime anti-Nazi endeavours, and an increasingly privatised welfare state. This is made more pressing by the secessionist pressures in Scotland.

In this context the 1980s multiculturalism espoused by Gilroy is unhelpful as it focuses on difference rather than commonality, and is likely to encourage indigenous nationalisms with exclusionary racial overtones. It is time for Gilroy to get beyond his own nostalgia and recognise that multiculturalism is not enough. Simon PartridgeLondon

I welcome Paul Gilroy's thoughtful reflections on Enoch Powell's "vile speech", and his call to "work through the past" to find a new sense of national identity beyond Hollywood versions of the anti-Nazi war and imperial yearning. Yet remembering an equally authentic tradition of wartime British anti-fascism must surely be part of that process. I remember demonstrating against Powell a few days after the rivers of blood speech in 1968 when he was in Nottingham. When some of the police started roughing up demonstrators, I appealed to the senior officer present that we had a right to protest against Powell in peace. He agreed, pulled his men back, took the worst offenders out of the line and told them that we had fought the war against people like Powell, and that his racism had no place in Britain. It was an inspirational moment, and it shows that there has always been more than one version of what our national heritage contains. Giles OakleyLondon

I saw The Great Escape many years ago, so can't really remember how anglicised it was; so in light of Paul Gilroy's article, it may be timely to point out that of the 50 murdered on recapture, after escaping from Stalag Luft III, 28 were non-British. These included several Poles, Australians, New Zealanders (one Maori), Canadians, Czechs, Norwegians, South Africans, a Frenchman, a Greek and a Lithuanian; although the British, of course, were in the majority. The survivors included more non-British, but no Poles were spared. The only three to evade recapture were two Norwegians and a Dutchman, though four Brits escaped again later.V JonesMalvern, Worcestershire

Tanya Gold (Infamy? They've got it, April 17) bemoans that Carry On films were "parables of failure", that the hero is "an everyman who lives a life of misery, unrequited lust and boredom" as though that was uniquely characteristic of that genre and told us something about the era in which they were made.

Has she ever seen: Porridge, One Foot in the Grave, Open All Hours, Black Books, The Fast Show, Little Britain, Till Death Us Do Part, Steptoe and Son, Father Ted, Only Fools and Horses, The IT Crowd, Blackadder, Men Behaving Badly, The Office, Rab C Nesbitt, Extras, The Young Ones, to name but a few?

The Carry On films merely attempted to appeal to what people in these isles find funny, whether it was 1958 or 2008. That we still laugh at essentially the same things might be sad, reassuring, or both! Robert PlumbSmethwick, West Midlands

Carry On films not funny? It took a few years for the format to find its feet, and the last few years (Emannuelle, England) were tired and sad, but the brilliant middle period (Cleo to Khyber) largely consisted of well-written historical pastiches with great jokes. They had me rolling in the aisles, and still do. If they fail to tickle Tanya Gold's funnybone, I can only suggest that, as a less uproarious account of Caesar's life puts it "the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves". Brian WrightLondon